| Sumario: | This study uses corpus-assisted discourse analysis to investigate the way U.S. secretaries of education have discursively constructed the topic of school choice in their public speeches over the course of 27 years, spanning four presidential administrations (1994–2020). Collocation and concordance analyses reveal a series of evolving discursive constructions: a public institutional frame favoring the prevailing logic of public schooling; an overtly neoliberal frame touting free markets, consumerism, and accountability for public systems; a depoliticized and technocratic neoliberal frame emphasizing high performance; and a populist, anti-institutional frame advocating choice as an end in itself. This study demonstrates how the language of school choice can tell us much about ideological trends in education reform. In particular, the analyses reveal an erosion of concern for the publicness of public schooling in federal school choice discourse.
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